“Danny called,” she says.
“Good Danny or bad Danny?”
“There is only one Danny.”
“You have had three Dannys.”
She points the wooden spoon at me without turning around. “This one is different.”
“They’re always different.”
“This one asked me to stay over tonight.” She turns now, spoon in hand, and looks at me with the brightness she gets when she’strying not to look too pleased about something. “He has that apartment in Tribeca. The one I told you about.”
“The good shower pressure one.”
“The very good shower pressure one.” She turns back to the stove. “I think I’m going to go after dinner. Is that okay?”
“Of course it’s okay. Go.”
She makes a sound of satisfaction and goes back to stirring and I stand at the counter and watch her and I think about what the apartment is going to feel like in an hour when she is gone and I’m alone with the thoughts I’ve been managing since three forty-five this afternoon when I walked out of Roman’s office and rode down fourteen floors in an elevator trying to keep my face arranged correctly.
We eat at the kitchen table the way we always eat, the television on in the background, conversation moving between easy things—Danny’s apartment, a colleague of Mara’s who has been making her life difficult, a show she wants me to watch that she has been recommending for three weeks. I listen and respond and eat the pasta, and I’m present enough that she doesn’t notice I’m not fully there. Or if she notices, she decides to let it go, which is one of the best things about Mara.
She leaves at eight thirty with her overnight bag and her good coat and a kiss on my cheek. The door closes behind her, and the apartment goes quiet.
I do the dishes.
I make tea.
I sit on the couch, and I try the television, but there’s nothing on that requires enough attention to be useful, so I turn it off and sitin the quiet. I let myself think about it properly for the first time all day.
Roman is getting married.
The Volkov woman, whoever she is, is going to move into that penthouse, sit at tables I have booked, attend events I have coordinated, and stand inside a life I have been managing from the outside for two years.
She is going to be his wife. She is going to have his name. She is going to exist in every space I have spent two years learning to navigate, and she is going to do all of it without knowing that the woman who built the calendar she lives by is currently seven weeks pregnant with her husband’s child.
I press the heel of my hand against my chest.
There are women who would say nothing. I have thought about this version of things more than I would like to admit. The version where I leave quietly, find another job, and raise this baby without ever telling anyone who the father is. It is not an impossible life. I could build something from it. I have built things from less.
But then I think about my father in his chair by the window getting quieter every time I visit, and Carla in the hallway with her folded dish towel and Aleksei’s number in her phone, and I think about a baby who is going to grow up and ask questions that I will not know how to answer honestly.
And I think about Roman walking into a council session with incomplete information, about to bind himself to a family that has been working against him for months, and I am the only person who knows the full shape of the thing pressing in on him from every side, and I have been saying nothing for seven weeks.
I look at my phone on the cushion beside me.
It is eleven fourteen.
I pick it up, and I pull up his contact, and I stare at his name for a long time. R. Petrov. The same contact I have had since my first week on the job, used hundreds of times for schedule updates, document confirmations, and meeting reminders, never once for anything like this.
I type before I can talk myself out of it.
I know it’s late. I was wondering if I could speak with you privately.
I read it once.
I press send.
